There is a moment a lot of business owners in Kathmandu eventually have. It is usually month six or seven. You are sitting with the monthly report, & it says reach is up 340 percent, engagement is up, impressions are up. & you realise you cannot remember the last time a customer said they found you on Google.
Nothing went obviously wrong. Nobody stole from you. The posts went up on time. It just did not turn into anything.
That is how choosing a digital marketing agency in Kathmandu usually fails. Not dramatically. Slowly, & politely, & with very tidy reporting.
This is not a list of qualities to look for. It is the set of questions we would want a friend to ask before signing with any digital marketing agency in Nepal, including ours.
First, work out what you are actually buying
"Digital marketing agency" covers a huge range in Kathmandu right now. Some are one person running Facebook boosts from a laptop in Baneshwor. Some are proper technical SEO teams. Most sit somewhere in between, & the price rarely tells you which one you are talking to.
Three different things get sold under the same name.
Search visibility. Someone types "orthodontist in Lalitpur" & you want to be the result they find. This is SEO. It is slow, it compounds, & it becomes the cheapest source of customers you have once it works. It is also the part that takes longest to prove.
Paid reach. You need the phone to ring this month. This is Meta & Google Ads. It works almost immediately & it stops the day you stop paying. There is no residual value. You are renting attention.
Brand & content. Design, photography, social posts, the general sense that your business knows what it is doing. It makes the other two convert better. On its own it very rarely sells anything.
Almost every digital marketing agency in Nepal will tell you they do all three. That is not the useful question. The useful question is which one they would put your money into in month one, & why.
Ask that. Then listen to how specific the answer gets.
If they say "we will do SEO, social media & ads together for maximum impact," you have already learned something. That is not a strategy. That is a menu.
& here is the version nobody says on a sales call. If you need customers in the next 30 days, SEO is the wrong first spend. It will not work fast enough. An honest agency will tell you to run ads first & start SEO in parallel, knowing perfectly well that the ad budget is not where their margin sits.
What digital marketing actually costs in Nepal
Nobody publishes this, which is strange, because it is the first thing everyone wants to know.
So here are rough numbers. Treat them as bands, not quotes. Every business is different, & anyone giving you an exact figure before understanding yours is guessing.
| Monthly budget (NPR) | Who that usually is | What you should actually get |
|---|---|---|
| 15,000 – 30,000 | Freelancer or a very small team | Social posting, basic ads management, one channel done properly |
| 30,000 – 75,000 | Small agency | SEO, content, ads management, an account manager you can call |
| 75,000 – 200,000+ | Established agency | Technical SEO, strategy, multi-channel work, reporting that ties to revenue |
At the bottom band you are realistically buying one person's part-time attention. That can be genuinely fine for a small local business with one channel that matters. It will not move you in a competitive search category.
The middle band is where most small & mid-sized Kathmandu businesses land, & it has the widest quality gap of the three. Two agencies charging the same 50,000 can deliver completely different things.
The top band is worth it if you are in a crowded category, running multiple locations, or selling to customers outside Nepal. It is overkill for a single-location shop.
Now the part that matters more than the numbers.
Price predicts almost nothing about quality in this market. We have seen a 20,000 rupee freelancer produce better results than a 90,000 rupee agency, because the freelancer actually fixed the Google Business Profile while the agency spent the retainer on a content calendar. We have also seen the reverse, more than once.
What price does tell you is how much time someone can afford to spend on you. At 20,000 a month nobody is doing a technical audit of your site. There is no room in that number for it. If an agency quotes you 20,000 & promises a technical audit, content, SEO, ads & social, either the scope is fiction or someone is about to burn out.
One more thing. Be careful with anyone selling SEO as a one-time package. "Complete SEO for 50,000, one time." Ranking is not something you finish. It is a position you hold against competitors who are also trying to hold it. A one-time SEO package usually means a spreadsheet of keywords, some meta tags rewritten, & then silence.
Do you even need an agency?
Worth asking before you take a single call.
A freelancer is often the right answer if you have one channel that matters, a budget under 30,000, & a business that sells locally. A good freelancer who understands your business will beat a mediocre agency juggling fourteen other clients. The risk is availability. Freelancers get sick, get better offers, & go quiet. Ask what happens then, before it happens.
Hiring in-house sounds cheaper than it is. A decent digital marketing person in Kathmandu costs somewhere around 40,000 to 80,000 a month, plus the hours you spend managing them. & here is what people underestimate: one person cannot do SEO, design, copywriting & paid ads well. Those are four different skills. You will get one done properly & three done badly. In-house works when you have enough volume to keep a specialist busy, or when you hire a manager who briefs external help.
An agency makes sense when you need several of those skills at once & cannot justify hiring for each. That is genuinely the whole argument. Not because agencies are magic, but because that skill mix is hard to buy any other way.
Publishing this probably costs us a few enquiries. It is still true.
Ask what they would do in your first 30 days
This is the single most useful question in the whole process, & most agencies fumble it, because they are pitching a template written before they looked at your business.
A real answer sounds something like this:
Your Google Business Profile has no primary category set, & the address on it does not match the one on your website, so we would fix that first because it is free & it moves quickly. Your site takes eleven seconds to load on a phone, which is probably costing you more than any ranking problem. We would not touch paid ads until the enquiry form works properly on mobile.
A template answer sounds like this:
We will begin with a comprehensive audit & develop a tailored strategy across SEO, social media & paid advertising to maximise your online presence.
You can tell the difference immediately. One of those people has looked at your business. The other has looked at a slide.
Simple test. Before the first call ends, ask them to name one specific thing they noticed about your website or your Google listing. If nobody can, they did not look. That is worth knowing before you pay a deposit.
Make them show real work, not claims
"We have helped 50+ businesses grow" is a sentence. It is not evidence.
Ask for one thing instead. One client, one specific result, one timeframe. A serious agency has this ready, because they track it internally anyway. Reporting is not extra work for them. It is the same work, shown to you.
If they cannot name a single client, it is either an NDA, in which case they will say so, or there is nothing to name.
Then do the two checks almost nobody does.
Check their own search presence. They are selling you SEO in Kathmandu. Search the terms they claim to be good at. Are they anywhere? An SEO agency that ranks for nothing is a strange place to buy SEO from. It is not disqualifying on its own, some good teams genuinely never market themselves, but ask them why & see whether the answer holds up.
Check their own website. Run it through PageSpeed Insights. It takes thirty seconds. If their own site is slow, broken on mobile, or missing basic meta tags, that is the standard of work you are about to buy.
& because Nepal is a small market, references verify fast. Message one of their listed clients directly. Two questions is enough: did the reporting make sense, & did anything actually change. You will learn more in five minutes than in another hour of sales calls.
How they report is how the relationship will feel
This is where most agency relationships in Nepal quietly die. Not because nothing happened, but because nobody could tell whether it did.
There are two kinds of numbers. Numbers that make a report look busy, & numbers that connect to money.
- Busy numbers: impressions, reach, engagement rate, follower growth, post likes.
- Money numbers: calls from your Google listing, form submissions, WhatsApp enquiries, rankings for searches that mean someone is ready to buy, & the point where people drop off before contacting you.
A report full of the first kind & none of the second is not necessarily dishonest. It is a report about activity rather than results. Activity is easy to produce. Results are not.
So ask this before you sign: what will next month's report tell me that I can actually act on?
If that answer is vague, the reports will be vague, & you will be sitting there in month six having the moment described at the top of this article.
Red flags worth walking away from
Not all of these are fatal on their own. Three or more together & you already know.
- Guaranteed number one rankings by a specific date. Nobody controls Google's algorithm, including people who work at Google. This promise usually means they will rank you for a phrase nobody searches.
- A proposal that arrived before any questions were asked. It was written for somebody else.
- Reporting that is mostly screenshots of post likes.
- They will not name a single client.
- A twelve-month lock-in with no exit clause. Confidence does not need a cage.
- The person who pitched you disappears after signing. Common here. Ask upfront who actually does the work.
- Pricing with no line items. "Digital marketing package, 60,000." Sixty thousand of what?
- Their own Google Business Profile is empty, unclaimed, or has no reviews.
- "We will boost your posts" as the entire strategy. Boosting is the least sophisticated thing you can do with Meta's ad platform, & it is what gets sold when nobody on the team knows the rest of it.
- Forty thousand followers & eleven likes a post. Bought. If they will fake their own numbers, think about what your report will look like.
- They can list your competitors' weaknesses but cannot describe your customer.
Match the work to where your business actually is
A good agency will tell you which of these you are, instead of putting everyone into the same package.
No real presence yet
Your Google Business Profile is incomplete or unclaimed, your site barely appears in search, you have almost no reviews. The work here is foundational & unglamorous. Technical fixes, profile setup, review generation, & keyword research based on what people in Nepal actually type rather than what sounds impressive in a proposal. This stage often produces the biggest percentage gains, simply because you are starting near zero.
Foundation exists, growth has stalled
You rank when someone searches your business name, & nothing else. This is the most common situation in Kathmandu & the most frustrating one. The work shifts to content that answers what customers ask before buying, local search handled separately for Kathmandu, Lalitpur & Bhaktapur if you serve all three, & slowly earning the authority Google uses to decide who to trust.
Actually competing
Multiple locations, a crowded category, or customers outside Nepal. Here you need something most agencies in Nepal are not set up for yet: AI search visibility. When someone asks ChatGPT or reads a Google AI Overview looking for a service in Kathmandu, a handful of businesses get named. Almost no Nepali businesses appear in those answers right now, largely because nobody has structured their information in a way those systems can read & cite. That gap is wide open at the moment. It will not stay open.
Ask an agency where they think you sit on that spectrum. If they skip straight to a package without asking one question about your business, you have your answer.
The part an outside agency will always miss
An agency in Delhi or Dubai can technically run a competent SEO campaign for a Nepali business. The mechanics are the same everywhere. What they consistently miss is the layer underneath.
Addresses here get written four different ways across four different platforms. Baneshwor, New Baneshwor & Naya Baneshwor are one place to a person & three places to Google. Consistency across listings matters more than almost anything else in local search, & it is nearly impossible to get right if you have never had to give someone directions in this city.
Ward numbers changed after the 2017 local government restructuring. Plenty of directories, listings & old citations never caught up. A lot of businesses in Kathmandu still have an old ward number sitting in some directory, quietly contradicting the current one.
People navigate by landmark, not by street. Opposite Bhatbhateni. Above the Nabil Bank. Near the Ring Road turning. There is no schema field for any of that. But it is what customers search, so it belongs in your page copy even when it cannot go in your structured data.
Reviews arrive in three scripts. English, Devanagari, & Roman Nepali. Replying in the language the review came in is a small thing that reads as a real business to both the customer & to Google. Most automated review tools handle exactly one of those three.
Search behaviour shifts around Dashain & Tihar in ways that make no sense on a global marketing calendar. Some categories go quiet for a fortnight. Others spike hard in the ten days before. An agency running a standard fourth-quarter playbook will spend your budget in the wrong two weeks.
& on the site itself, having eSewa or Khalti visible does more for trust with a Nepali customer than any security badge. That is not strictly an SEO point. It is the same underlying thing: knowing what makes someone here decide you are real.
None of this appears in a generic SEO checklist, because those checklists were written for markets with standardised addressing & a single script.
Eleven questions to ask before you sign
1. How is pricing structured: retainer, project, or performance?
Most real SEO & content work is retainer-based, because it is ongoing. Performance pricing sounds attractive & usually hides something in how performance is defined. Ask exactly what triggers payment.
2. Who owns the accounts if we part ways?
This is the question nobody asks & everybody regrets. Google Ads account, Google Business Profile, Meta Business Manager, domain, analytics. If those sit in the agency's name, leaving means starting again with zero history. Get ownership in your name before anything begins.
3. Who actually does the work?
The person pitching, or a team you have not met? Having a delivery team is normal & fine. Finding out about it in month two is not.
4. What happens if this is not working in three months?
A good agency will name a checkpoint & be willing to say plainly that an assumption did not hold. That is far more trustworthy than an agency reporting steady progress indefinitely.
5. Is there a lock-in period, & what is the exit process?
Ask about notice period, final invoice, & handover.
6. What do I keep if we stop?
Content, designs, keyword research, account access, historical data. Get it in writing.
7. How often will we actually speak?
A monthly report plus a call is normal. A report with no conversation is how small misunderstandings become six wasted months.
8. What do you need from me?
Every agency needs something. Photos, product details, approvals, someone who replies to messages. An agency that says "nothing, leave it all to us" is either about to produce generic work or about to stall in month two & blame you for it.
9. Which of my competitors have you looked at?
They should be able to name two or three & say something specific about what those competitors are doing well.
10. What would you do if you had half this budget?
The answer shows you what they genuinely think matters, as opposed to what was added to fill out the proposal.
11. Have you worked in my category before, & what did you learn?
Not having worked in your category is fine. Not being curious about it is not.
What to check this week
- Write down what you actually need before taking a single sales call. Customers this month, visibility over the next year, or a brand that looks credible. Those are three different problems with three different budgets.
- Ask every agency for one specific result with a client name & a timeframe attached to it.
- Ask what they would do in your first 30 days, for your business specifically. Note who names something concrete & who does not.
- Run their own website through PageSpeed Insights, & search for the terms they claim to rank for.
- Confirm account ownership is in your name before you sign anything.
- Check for a lock-in clause, & ask what happens if the strategy needs to change halfway.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a digital marketing agency cost in Nepal?
Roughly NPR 15,000 to 30,000 a month for a freelancer, 30,000 to 75,000 for a small agency, & 75,000 upward for an established one. Price does not reliably predict quality in Kathmandu. What it does predict is how much time somebody can afford to spend on your account.
How long does SEO take to work in Nepal?
Google Business Profile & local listing fixes can show movement in two to six weeks. Ranking for competitive commercial searches usually takes four to eight months, sometimes longer in crowded categories. Anyone promising faster is either targeting phrases nobody searches or hoping you will not check.
Should I start with SEO or Google Ads?
If you need enquiries within 30 days, start with ads. If you can wait a few months & want cheaper customers over the long run, start with SEO. Most businesses end up running both, with ads funding the wait while SEO builds.
Is a freelancer good enough for a small business in Kathmandu?
Often yes, if you need one channel done well & your budget is under 30,000 a month. The trade-off is capacity & continuity. Ask what happens if they get busy, unwell, or take a bigger client.
How do I know if my current agency is doing anything?
Check three things yourself. Is your Google Business Profile complete & collecting new reviews. Do you rank for anything beyond your own business name. Are enquiries going up. If the reports are full of reach & impressions but none of those three moved, ask directly what changed.
Can an agency guarantee a first-page ranking?
No, & the guarantee itself is the warning. Nobody outside Google controls the ranking system. What can honestly be committed to is process, reporting, & a clear checkpoint where you decide together whether it is working.
What is a normal contract length in Nepal?
Three to six months is reasonable for SEO, because anything shorter cannot show results fairly. Twelve months with no exit clause is worth pushing back on.
Do I need content in Nepali?
It depends who buys from you. For local services, Nepali-language content & replying to Nepali reviews in Nepali helps with both customers & search. If you sell mainly to customers outside Nepal, English is usually enough.
If you are comparing agencies right now
Every agency has a reason to tell you they are the right fit. We do too. Which is why the more useful exercise is not reading more agency websites. It is taking the questions above into two or three conversations & noticing where the answers get vague.
That gap will tell you more than any pitch deck.
If you want a second opinion on a proposal you have already received, or want to know what we would actually prioritise for your business in month one, start a conversation. Or have a look at the work we have done for other clients first. We would rather you compare us properly than take our word for it.